MONDO EXTRAS

Kendra reports to CIC, and Helena immediately asks if she enjoyed her coffee. "Just say yes, so we don't get off from the wrong foot." To Kendra's credit, she does. "Good! You see, because I figured that you either got lost on your way to CIC or you stopped for a cup of coffee and frankly, I'd rather think it was a cup of coffee than realize my new aide can't find her way around a Battlestar." Belzen smiles, secretly; Fisk nearly giggles at his station. One of the saddest things about this story is Fisk's capacity for joy, so surprising throughout, and so inevitably destroyed. Fisk's weakness, it's something we knew about but never saw so clearly as in this story. Simple weakness, like Gaius's; the cause of so much misery. And the only thing more terrible than Fisk's weakness is the strength of everybody else. Kendra begins to apologize and Helena cuts her short, like a razor: "I'm not finished speaking. I know why you're here. You're here because you think this job is a stepping stone to a still better one. So let me guess, you had your mother pull some strings. And she --" Kendra interrupts, warning Helena: her mother died of cancer. Helena is unimpressed: her mother died in fire. "While I'm very sorry for your loss, you'd be well advised to make that the last time you play on my sympathies." Helena creates a story about Cain, becomes a legend every day she walks these halls: the woman without fear, without sympathy, without anything but will. This is how our legacies are made: by the stories that we spread, about ourselves. When it's propaganda you can control it, but like the man said: be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be. Helena sends Hoshi off with the mostly terrified Kendra; she and Belzen laugh. "A little mid-morning snack." Kendra won't make these mistakes again; she'll make new ones, and be punished, and new ones again, and eventually she'll run out of mistakes. Cain's Law.